How do children in multilingual households differentiate between the two (or more) languages they’re being taught?
In: Other
I think kids can pretty much distinguish between English from our local languages by sound. For example, people here in the Philippines speak multiple languages. We speak Tagalog (aka “Filipino”), English, and other local languages (like Cebuano, Ilocano, etc). Tagalog only has “full” short vowels while English has both “short” and “long” vowels (which Tagalog does not have). Also, Tagalog does not natively have sounds such as f, v, j, q, and z. (I guess it’s trickier to distinguish among local languages since they are closely related, like the many Visayan languages like Cebuano, Hiligaynon, etc.) Since we are multilingual, we also mix languages in sentences (something we call “Taglish” or conversational Filipino).
Latest Answers